I just traveled to the King of Prussia store, and learned that IF you are in your 14 day return period, bring in your iPhone and receipt, and they will refund the difference of $200.

What was I doing at the Apple store you may ask…I don’t know….

Apple, has shook things up!!!

Today they announced new iPods, Nanos and the brand new iPod Tocuh!!!

Starting at $299 for 4gb, and $399 for 8Gb. It has everything the iPhone has except, no phone, and no camera. Other then that, it’s sweet!!!!

Also, in other huge news, they lowered the price of the iPhone to $399 for 8GB!! Wow, $200 drop in two months. I want to know if the 4gb is now $299??? They didn’t mention that.

Way to go Apple!!!

 EDIT:  Yes, I just confirmed, the 4GB is $299! Once their gone, their gone for good!

Jenneth Orantia from Gear Diary think UMPCs are great. Don’t beleive me, click the link. I happen to agree. I just wish UMPCs would drop the huge space around the screen, and went to all screen.

Check out the article!

Sumocat threw me a topic. Thanks a lot Sumocat! I was enjoying my non-writing day! You see, I gave myself off today, since yesterday, I spent hours, and hours writing a masterpiece called:

How many trees have you saved with a Tablet PC?

And now, on my day off you have the nerve to throw something back at me to write. Geez, I ready don’t want to, but I guess I have to…(Joking Of Course)

You want to know what gadgets I use on a daily basis? I think my answer may surprise you…

Let me first start off by telling you about my main computer. I’ve used this computer since August 2003. It’s none other then a HP Desktop! Yeah, that’s right, my main computer is a desktop. What’s wrong with that? If I can remember correctly, it’s 2.8 ghz P4 processor with HT. It has 512MB of ram, and a big hard drive. This baby does everything I need it to do. The only problem, it’s not mobile.

My wife owns a Acer 3680 Notebook, which we bought last March for $399. It’s a Celeron M 1.4 Ghz, with 512MB of ram, and Windows Vista Basic. Oh, that reminds me I have to write another article about how I configured Windows Basic to run a decent speed with 512MB of ram for a commentator. Thanks Sumocat! More work.

I also have a HP Laptop, though, I don’t know which model. It’s about 2 years old and it’s my mothers. She just upgraded to a new Dell, so I’m ‘borrowing’ the HP for now.

I don’t have a fancy camera, I think it’s a 1.3 MP. I’ve had it for years. I still think it takes amazing pictures.

I’m currently working on getting a Refurbished iPhone. I must admit, I really miss it. What I discovered is, I may be able to get a discount on the $399 phone and a discounted plan. Stay tuned…

You’re leaving something out Mike, aren’t you?

Leaving out? Aw, yes, my mistake, you want to know what goes in my gadget bag.

Nothing.

I don’t use a gadget bag. I used to, and will again some day, but for now, I don’t use one.

You’re still leaving something out! Uh, what about a tablet….pc…perhaps?

Yes, the tablet pc. I’m not leaving anything out. I don’t own a tablet pc.

Huh? But…but…how can that be? You’re a huge tablet supporter and you wrote a freak’n article called, How Many Trees Have you Save with a Tablet????

I know. I am a huge supporter and always will be. But at this time I don’t own one. It’s simple, really. Back in March I owned a Samsung Q1, and it died. It did not have a warranty , so I had to pay to get it fix. That wasn’t in my budget, so it was never fixed. I would like to buy a computer with a warranty, and as of now they are too expensive. Even the UMPCs are out of my range. The Samsung Q1U is $899. That’s a lot it you think about it. This is why I’m such a big supporter of cheaper gadgets.

There you have it. A look into my gadget world. I get by with what I have, and that’s just that.

On a serious note, thanks for the topic Sumocat! Check out his blog ‘The World’s Best Inkblog’ at Sumocat Scribbles.

Think about it. How many tress have you saved with your Tablet PC? Without your Tablet PC, all of the ink notes you taken, would of been taken on paper. Every single entry in your tablet, would of been written on a tree. I ask again, how many trees have you saved? To discover the answer, we need to take a journey back in time. Back before we had Tablet PCs.

How, you ask?

Care to step in my time machine?

POOF!!!

Before you owned a Tablet PC, think about all of the paper you used in the past. Think of all of the notebooks, post it stamps, calendars, sheets, and paper tablets you used on a yearly basis. I ‘m serious, take 20 seconds and remember. For some it was pre-2003, others it was a bit later. But there was a time when you were all paper based, with your everyday writings on some type of paper. You couldn’t get enough of it. You were addicted to paper! Well, that is, until you discover the wonderful world of Tablet PCs, of course.

And that brings me to my next stop. Lets move forward a bit to the time when you owned a tablet. Since owning a tablet, think about EVERYTHING you written in your tablet. I’m talking about everything. Take 60 seconds for this one. Look at all of your One Note entry’s, MS Journal and any other applications you may use to take notes, drawings, etc..Every meeting. Every art piece. Every note, all in your Tablet PC.

Once you have an understanding of what you written in your tablet, you should begin to realize that by using a tablet, you are saving a lot of paper. Still not convinced? Take another trip with me. But this time, instead of going forward, or back through time, let’s go parallel. Yes, let’s jump to a parallel universe. Come on, don’t be frighten. It will be fun. We’ll have a jolly good time. To entice you I’ll let you in on a well known fact of this parallel universe. Your not going to believe this, but water has been replaced with beer. Yes, that’s right, beer. Water fountains, are beer fountains. Ordinary tab water is now ordinary beer. So do you want to go?

POOF!!!

I knew you would fall for that one. He..he..he.. No silly, water wasn’t replace with beer in this universe, but on a serious note Tablet PCs were never invented. Well, that’s not entirely true, they were invented, they just never made it past 2003. You see, Bill Gates retired from Microsoft and now runs a charity strip club called, Winhoes. I’m not making the crap up. Because of his departure, the Tablet PC project was grounded and never took off. Here in this world, since there are no Tablet PCs, everything is paper based. Everything you once written in your tablet now is on paper. I understand this is an evil world, and you sure don’t want to live in it, but it gets even worst.

Trees, are becoming even more sparse. Since there is no alternative, everybody just uses paper. Tree shortages have been reported all over the world. There are even several reports of people cutting down there own trees and selling them on a black market. Though, at this time, those rumors have not been confirmed. Get this, it gets even worst.

Rob Bushway, and Hugo Ortago own JUST notebooks!! GASP!!!!!! Sure Rob is in love with his Sony TR, but Hugo is on his 512th Notebook in his quest to find the perfect notebook. Warner, has gone far enough to live with ink stains on his notebooks, because he needs to take notes on his notebook! And Dennis Rice doesn’t even exist!

But it get worst, Gottabemobile, has become GottaWishWeWereMobile.com. JKontherun has become JkIsntMovingFromThisChair.com. Finally, Kevin Tofel doesn’t patronize coffee shops! No, he has no reason too. But get this, it gets worst. Much worst. This is so horrifying, that I don’t even want to talk about it.

But before we get to the really bad news, let’s get some good news. My good blogging friend, Sumocat’s Scribbles is still exists!!!! This is wonderful news as his persistence’s has paid off! Can you believe he still has an ink blog? But having an ink blog comes with a price, a big price. That brings me to my  really bad news, so brace yourself. Sumocat uses writing paper and ink for ALL of his posts. After using paper and ink, he scans his writings into his notebook for web posting. I hate to say it, but Sumocat, himself, has nearly consumed roughly half the tree resources with his ink blog…Not good news at all…

I think it’s time we leave this miserable world….Wouldn’t you agree?

POOF!!!

We’re back! Thank you lord! It’s good to be back to our world were Tablet PCs still exist! So what did we learn from this trip, other then Hugo, Warner, Sumocat and Rob would be a wreck without tablets. If you use a tablet, then you are helping the environment. No you really are!  Add up everything you write in a tablet that would of been on paper, then add up all of the tablet users in the world, then you can see that what we are are doing is a good thing, and we don’t even realize it. If rest of the world would just start using Tablets PCs instead of paper, then if you really think about it, the world would be in a even better place, environmentally.

Enjoy your tablets, because somewhere out there, in another world, Tablet PCs don’t exist…spooky

On jkontherun.com, James wrote a very well written article called:

JK opinion- Vista will never run well on mobile devices

Even though I enjoyed his article, I must disagree. In the comments section, Ctitanic of http://ultramobilepc-tips.blogspot.com/ wrote this comment:

“Guys, I don’t know what you are talking about. Yesterday I was working in my Q1 and I was thinking for myself, I’m so happy with Vista responds time in my Q1 that I’m afraid to move on to any of the new coming UMPCs.

I have been optimizing it, but not so deep as others. I do not have any more those HDD bashing. The only thing that I would improve would be the time to come back from Hibernation but I have to say also that I have a lot of programs working in my taskbar and around 70 process running all time.

And that’s in a Q1 Celeron running at 900 MHz. I tested Vista in a eo v7110 (VIA). It was slow and once the beta expired and have not comeback to Vista, I stayed in XP because I considered Vista too much for that processor. But… I had only 1 GB in that machine while in my Q1 I have 2 GB. And I mention this RAM difference because believe me, Vista does not run well in 1 GB of RAM. The performance is increased a lot just by adding that extra gibabyte.

In conclusion, I think that Vista is perfect for UMPCs but… it has to be optimized. I think that Microsoft should create some kind of optimization profiles where people can select what is better for them. And I say this because I’m that James, Kevin and other people reading our blogs can follow our optimization instructions but that’s probably 10% or less of all consumers.”

I must say I agree 100% with him on this one. This was my comment:

“James,

Your forgetting that when XP was released, people spent tons of time trying to optimizing it because it had it’s problems. Heck, when my parents bought a new notebook last year, I had to spend time turning certain things off to optimized XP.

Up to this point I’m enjoying Vista. I spend about 20 minutes turning certain things off, but once I done that, I have Vista running just as well as it did on XP. And the notebook is a Acer Celeron M 1.5, with 512MB!!!! Yes it’s Vista Basic, but Vista runs with no problems. I have no problems connecting to the network. I have no problems surfing the net.

I believe Vista will be there one day. But I think Microsoft should of created another version of Vista. Vista for Mobile(or Smaller) machines. Ultimate, Business, Premium, MOBILE, and Basic.”

My wife owns a Acer Notebook that we purchased in March. The specs are as follows: Celeron M 1.5, 512MB. Vista Basic.

When we bought the machine the sales man kept trying to upsale us to a higher priced machine. His pitch was, that this machine is too slow for Vista. After he finally gave up he recommended we get another 512MB of ram. I was planning on, but not just yet.

When I first started to use the machine, is was slooooooooooooooooow.

Applications took forever to open. However, after spending about 20 minutes, turning off features my wife did not need, the machine was performing with no speed problems at all. Was it super fast? No. But it was perfect for my wife.

I do plan on upgrading the ram to 1GB at some point, but for now, this has been one of her favorite computers to date.

To get a post out, I’m going to post about nothing. Yup, that’s right, it’s about nothing. I have nothing to post about, so I’ll post about nothing.

I mean, I guess I could come up with something, but I’ll stick to nothing. Besides, it worked for Seinfeld.

Today, marks this blog one month old. Whoo hoo! Yey!!!!!

Boy this is great… But on the other hand, I haven’t been writing much and my site gets as many hits as a two door one handle garage!

I barley get 4 a day! I remember when there was a time I got 549 views in one day…

Yes, it was July 17th, 2007. When I released:

Apple Store using Windows XP Machines?

Which was true. But I was unable to follow that up with anything good. Even my good buddy, Johnny Splitshispants, said I should hang it up.

But I won’t! Why, because I’m the Underdog, you see. And it’s ain’t over until I…I mean, It ain’t over until we think…no, I mean it’s ain’t over til it’s over.

And it’s ain’t over….

I just discovered a new site called Justin TV. It’s a site full of live webstreams of people. No, no, no, it’s not cam girls teasing you for a price. No, it’s regular people and their daily lives.

Like today, I watched Justin eat lunch in real time. Boy that was cool. Well, it was kind of cool, right? Ok, it was not cool at all.  I mean, I watched  somebody eat lunch their lunch. Maybe if I ate lunch at the same time, I could say, I sat down with Justin and ate lunch with him.

Or not.

My question is could live streaming, of people eating lunch, staring at computers, and reading be fun?

My vacation is officially over. I don’t want it to be, but I can’t control time, so it has ended. It was a fun filled vacation and much better then last year.

I and the wife, traveled to Woodloch, PA for a family vacation. Upon arriving we were met with a Spaghetti dinner, and a night with her family.

Woodloch is a mountainous, outdoors place with plenty of activities. They had hiking, go carts, bumper cars, batting cages, horse shoes, shuffle board, skeet shotting, and many more.

We did everything we could do, and I loved every minute. We also attended two nightly shows. The first was a fun filled horse racing night for adults and kids. Real horses weren’t racing.  A man would roll dice, to see which horse would win the race. We had so much fun, and my wife hit two out of three races.

The second show, consisted of music from around the world. I was a bit bored, but others looked like they enjoyed it.

But my all time favorite is when we took a trip to the waterfalls. I think I snapped some amazing pictures. Me and the wife will return one day, as it was a amazing experience.

Here are photos from the trip:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53174156@N00/sets/72157601247370477/show/